Aftermarket Europe: Creating the Best Outcomes Through Digitization

The European economy and the manufacturing footprint is humming again!

This year, we decided to understand that market better by attending Aftermarket Europe (AME) in Hamburg, Germany. Over 200 Sales and Service leaders attended for best practice sharing and to meet for continuous learning. Here, it was clear that digitization was a key focus for many of these Aftermarket and Sales leaders. The focus on digitization allows many organizations to deliver increased value to their end customers and with that reap the reward of growth for their organization. This digitization ranged from connected assets to augmented reality based field service.

The days were packed with some great sessions. Looking across these sessions, we noticed that digitization was viewed more as a means for many Aftermarket leaders to create better outcomes for their customers.

Most end customers will own, operate and maintain this asset over a lengthy life cycle. Typically a good customer outcome involves maximizing equipment uptime at the lowest cost possible. When an OEM can stay close to the customer over the lifecycle of the asset, they uncover more ways to maximize equipment uptime. The voice of the customer data that reveals itself during the operation of the asset also opens innovative new solutions.

So there we were, with hundreds of forward looking people who really wanted to create the best outcomes for their customers. There was just one problem, knowing where to start was somewhat elusive. New Product Development (NPD) for original equipment has many benefits. Speed to market, in many cases, however, is not one of the outcomes with most NPD organizations. There are new innovations coming out of the Innovation and NPD process – one of which is iOT and the connected asset. Yes, connected assets is one way to get there, but most OEMs only have a very small percentage of their installed base that is connected today. It will take a few years before majority of the install base is connected.

In order to truly drive this shift towards customer asset reliability and improved uptime, OEMs need to rely on their data (no matter how messy) and understand their installed base. From talking to multiple people at AME, we quickly noticed that this was not always the case. Their Installed Base knowledge and the ability to deploy this tool to their salesforces was immature. Therefore, it should not have surprised us when people were quickly drawn to the Entytle Insyghts Install Base view. From there, we showed people how easy it was to act on their install base either through campaigns or our predictive parts opportunity generation.

Overall, the conference was great for us to understand the latest trends in aftermarket as well as identify key pain points for OEMs today. Here at Entytle, we hope to stay ahead of the latest trends and make it easy for our customers to follow suit.